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I’ve always found it a shame that the UNIX philosophy seemed to stop at system/command line tools and no one ever took the further step to apply it to user inte

by gyomu 2y ago

I’ve always found it a shame that the UNIX philosophy seemed to stop at system/command line tools and no one ever took the further step to apply it to user interfaces. UIs generated in systematic, composable ways emerging naturally from all the plumbing (pipes, option flags, etc) we already have in place.

perching_aix 2y ago
There was a time when I'd have agreed with you. But over time I've come to honestly disagree, perhaps unsurprisingly, since I detest the typical command line experience too. Just like when books are adapted into movies, the good adaptations are the ones that are better than the sum of their parts (aren't a direct adaptation). Blind, generic composability is in direct contradiction with this. One could argue that it's the scale that determines whether a better integrated or a consistent but generic solution is better, but in this case I think the article very explicitly demonstrates that the latter approach is what loses out. I have a very strong and persistent disdain towards the many shell incantations I had to come up with, have to keep around as notes, and have to have AI generated. Having to navigate the maze the article calls a GUI would result in much the same. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills seeing people in this thread regarding this visual any good, especially given how even the article author clearly disagrees, hence "why" the article was created in the first place.
tpmoney 2y ago
Every few years I get the urge to dive into smalltalk/squeak/cuis/<insert smalltalk variant here> and while it suffers from being pretty heavily stuck in an era and a small community it always feels like a window into what could have been if operating systems in general and unix in particular didn’t stop at CLIs with a window manager tacked on top. In fact having recently revisited some old classic Mac things, it’s sort of interesting to note how despite how nice it is that osx has Unix underneath and windows has the WSL it also means we’re converging on a design with a lot of old baggage.

by gyomu 2y ago

perching_aix 2y ago

There was a time when I'd have agreed with you. But over time I've come to honestly disagree, perhaps unsurprisingly, since I detest the typical command line experience too. Just like when books are adapted into movies, the good adaptations are the ones that are better than the sum of their parts (aren't a direct adaptation). Blind, generic composability is in direct contradiction with this. One could argue that it's the scale that determines whether a better integrated or a consistent but generic solution is better, but in this case I think the article very explicitly demonstrates that the latter approach is what loses out. I have a very strong and persistent disdain towards the many shell incantations I had to come up with, have to keep around as notes, and have to have AI generated. Having to navigate the maze the article calls a GUI would result in much the same. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills seeing people in this thread regarding this visual any good, especially given how even the article author clearly disagrees, hence "why" the article was created in the first place.

tpmoney 2y ago

Every few years I get the urge to dive into smalltalk/squeak/cuis/<insert smalltalk variant here> and while it suffers from being pretty heavily stuck in an era and a small community it always feels like a window into what could have been if operating systems in general and unix in particular didn’t stop at CLIs with a window manager tacked on top. In fact having recently revisited some old classic Mac things, it’s sort of interesting to note how despite how nice it is that osx has Unix underneath and windows has the WSL it also means we’re converging on a design with a lot of old baggage.